Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby is professor of the history of art and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley.
Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo
Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo
United States of America
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Description: Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00220
In the decades following the French Revolution, four artists—Girodet, Gros, Géricault, and Delacroix—painted works in their Parisian studios that vividly expressed violent events and issues in faraway, colonial lands. This highly original book examines six of these paintings and argues that their disturbing, erotic depictions of slavery, revolt, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction chart the history of France’s empire and colonial politics.

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby shows that these paintings about occurrences in the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece are preoccupied not with mastery and control but with loss, degradation, and failure, and she explains how such representations of crises in the colonies were able to answer the artists’ longings as well as the needs of the government and the opposition parties at home. Empire made painters devoted to the representation of liberty and the new French nation confront liberty’s antithesis: slavery. It also forced them to contend with cultural and racial differences. Young male artists responded, says Grigsby, by translating distant crises into images of challenges to the self, making history painting the site where geographic extremities and bodily extremities articulated one another.

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Print publication date May 2002 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300088878
EISBN 9780300259100
Illustrations 221
Print Status out of print
Description: Scale
The screen remained entirely black. “Night after night,” the American sculptor Gutzon Borglum (1867–1941), most famous for making Mount Rushmore, projected a two-and-a-half-inch glass slide ...
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
Related print edition pages: pp.66-102
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00194.003